


If, Indeed

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [274]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: 19th Century, A Lack of Loving Expression, Bickering, M/M, Mutual Pining, Pining, References to The Early Church Monkeying With St. Paul's Letters, Seriously Lads Get It Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-23
Updated: 2019-06-23
Packaged: 2020-05-18 09:29:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19331800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: “What I don’t understand,” Crowley said, “is why they spend so much of their not-at-all unlimited time and energy looking for The One.”Aziraphale folded down his newspaper and squinted at his friend. “The one what?”“Pffft, you know.” Crowley waved his hands about his head, his eyes goggled stupidly. “The One.”





	If, Indeed

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Soulmates. Prompt from this [generator](https://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

“What I don’t understand,” Crowley said, “is why they spend so much of their not-at-all unlimited time and energy looking for The One.”

Aziraphale folded down his newspaper and squinted at his friend. “The one what?”

“Pffft, you know.” Crowley waved his hands about his head, his eyes goggled stupidly. “ _The One_.”

“Yes,” Aziraphale said patiently. Sometimes Crowley was like this, exasperatingly vague-- especially on a morning after a spectacular bender when the angel extended an invitation for brunch. There was no rule that said Crowley had to pop over just because Aziraphale asked, no matter how scrumptious Aziraphale knew his French toast was, how perfectly crisp and browned his bacon. Not that Crowley had ever actually admitted to enjoying either, but nor, the angel noted now with a spark of triumph, had his friend left a scrap on his plate.

Now the demon leaned over said plate, glaring. “Their soulmate, you git. That’s what they call them: The One.”

This was news to Aziraphale, the sort of news that one generally didn’t find in _The Times_ : that is to say, incorrect.

“Do they now?” he said. “Huh. How very odd.”

“Yes. It’s in all their novels and things, their plays, you know. Art. I’d have thought you’d have noticed.”

“Huh,” said Aziraphale again. “From whom did they get that idea?”

Crowley’s eyebrow shot up. “From your side, I should think. The great minds that brought you Adam and Eve and all that. Set up a binary system right from the start, didn’t you? Of course they’re gonna follow that.”

“Well,” Aziraphale said nervously, for the thought had never occurred, “more than likely, it was for simplicity’s sake, you know. Or perhaps after creating two of such complex species, the Lord was a bit, er, tuckered out.”

This, Aziraphale well knew, wasn’t true. The original plans for the Garden of Eden--plans to which he’d been privy but over which he’d had no creative control, sadly--had always included two of what God called “humans” but Gabriel had lavishly dubbed “angels _sans_ wings,” at least until the Lord had gotten wind of it and (so far as Aziraphale understood) told Gabriel to stop improvising and stick to the script.

And it had been part of the script, too, for each human not to be limited in the choice of fruitful (physical and/or metaphorical) partnerships; there was not, Aziraphale was certain, a single One. It had been brought up In the Beginning, of course, a suggestion from Michael and his ramrod-straight lot: _Script their stories,_ they'd said. _Write their tales. Set them loose only on the paths we have chosen for them_ , et cetera. It was silly, Aziraphale had thought then, though of course no one had asked his opinion; why go to all the trouble of creating something as wondrous as a world and then spoil it by dictating everything? They had already built a universe at the Lord’s direction, following every instruction to a T, and the whole point of the Earth, Aziraphale had believed, was to give God a go at a different sort of direction: free will and choice and all that.

In the sense, good sense had won and the humans were set to wander about and fight and mate and wander still further as they liked. It had taken a bit of getting used to; it had taken centuries for the Lord to stop losing Her temper and lashing out with natural disasters whenever the humans did something she didn’t like. But never in all those millennia had Aziraphale known the Supreme Being to give a toss about any human’s love life--aside from that young girl in Judea whose marriage to a carpenter had been so fortuitously timed with God’s sudden itch for offspring. No human had a singular solemate per se; how odd, the angel thought, neatly folding his newspaper and setting it aside with care, for them to focus on the notion of The One.

“No,” he said with a firm shake of his head. “That isn’t ours.”

“Are you sure?” Crowley was smirking now, the telltale curl of his lip that Aziraphale had long since learned meant _ha! the angel doesn’t have all the facts._

“No,” Aziraphale said again. “I’m certain. We wouldn’t lie to them about something like that.”

Crowley sat back a little, his mouth still quirked. There was a peak of gleam in his eyes. “Oh, come on. Yes, you would.”

“May I remind you that the whole nonsense of marriage was, as you put it, one of yours? We’d cast our lot pretty clearly with celibacy.”

“Well, I can’t take credit for it directly,” Crowley said with a snort, “but I know the lad who whispered into the ear of the right elder during the early days of the Church. He’s the one who rejiggered Paul’s letters, that elder was. Heh!” Here here grinned at Aziraphale. “Difficult to be celibate when God’s book is telling you to have shack up and have kids, isn’t it?”

Aziraphale sighed. “I did warn them about the dangers of dictation, Crowley. Wrote many a strongly worded letter along those lines.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“I’d be surprised if any of them were opened, frankly.”

“Ach,” Crowley said. He patted Aziraphale’s arm. “That was their mistake, then, wasn’t it? Don’t be hard on yourself about it.”

“Still,” Aziraphale said, “regardless of whose fault it is, that still leaves us with the same problem.”

“What problem?”

“How do we dissuade all the people wandering about out there that love is the goal, hmm, the thing they should be striving for. Not this silly notion of _The One_. What if that one lives halfway around the world, after all?”

“True.”

“They’ve barely mastered seafaring, after all, in this part of the world, at least. What if you’re born in a bog in Ireland or something and your One lives at the tip of Cape Horn? What’s the likelihood of you finding them or them blundering up this way to find you?”

“Somewhere less than zero.”

Aziraphale frowned, his thoughts distressed and zooming about at a thousand miles an hour. “Or who’s to say if this One will walk the earth at the same time that you do? What if they’re only born after you die?”

“Az.”

“Or what if you get married to a bloke who seems nice and then a few later, alakazam! You run into The One in the street.”

Crowley’s hand on his forearm tightened. “ _Aziraphale_.”

“What?”

“Calm down.”

“But--!”

“I was only pulling your leg,” Crowley said. His friend looked genuinely distressed. “Needling at you, you know. I wasn’t trying to get you upset.”

“I’m not upset, I’m”--here Aziraphale flailed--“distressed on someone else’s behalf.”

“You feel too much, angel. You always have. Sensitive as all get out when it comes to the humans, aren’t you? Have been since they day that we met.”

“Yes, well,” Aziraphale said with a bit of a sniff. “I like them.”

He had always done, ever since he’d first see the sketches of their original design: when it came to people, truly, these fragile creatures so dependent on their corporeal form, Aziraphale had been in love since they were merely an idea.

Crowley’s fingers slipped to his. “I shouldn’t have teased you,” the demon said kindly. “Not about them. I’m sorry, my friend.”

Aziraphale met his eyes, felt his own tear at the fondness he found there. “Apology accepted.”

Crowley’s mouth lifted and it seemed, for a moment at the breakfast table in 1815, that there was something very much more to be said. It hung in the air between them, the air stuffy with the smell of old books and powdered sugar and, if one sniffed very sternly, a hint of last night’s wine. Aziraphale’s soul sang with affection; not for the first time, his cheeks colored and something very deep in him trembled and he wondered, asked: _should I give this voice?_

But then there was a clatter of hooves on the cobblestones outside, a shout of a man in the street, and the moment--fragile as it was, like the softest spun sugar--gave way over their empty plates and gently, inexorably collapsed.

“Anyway,” Crowley said, sliding his hand free and looking vaguely embarrassed, “it was the humans who came up with it, this whole daft notion of The One.”

Aziraphale cleared his throat and reached for his coffee. “Really?”

“Yeah. They think it’s romantic or something, I guess, the idea of having a soulmate. Very silly if you ask me.”

“Oh yes,” the angel said, busying himself with the cream and the sugar and keeping his gaze from Crowley’s face, his mouth still full of all the mad things he’d quite nearly said. “Very silly indeed. Not to mention factually inaccurate. Not my definition of romantic at all.”

Crowley chuckled. The sound was a little pained. “For them, angel, I think silly and romantic go hand in hand.”

Later, when his friend had gone and he’d washed and set away the dishes, Aziraphale sat in his favorite window seat with a book on his lap. He’d no idea what it was; he’d tugged it from the shelf at random. After ten minutes gazing out at the street, he hadn’t made it past the flyleaf. It was just as well, really, for he would have been unable to read the words on any page: Crowley’s face in that crystalline moment--gentle, full of affection, fear dampened for hope--would not, could not, leave his mind.

How many times over the years had the demon looked at him thus? There was no way to know. How many times had the angel caught him doing so? A hundred, at least. Perhaps more. How many times had he allowed himself to gaze back? Far fewer. Far fewer, indeed.

But never before, as he had on this rainy April day, had he come so close to expressing what had hung for so long in the place he liked to think of as his heart.

 _I love you_ . Is that what he would have said? _I adore you, even when you irritate me, darling Crowley. Perhaps especially then_.

He’d let it slip by, hadn’t he, like a lost ship in the night, and who knew if such a chance--such a shot of sudden if incomplete bravery--might ever sail by his way again?

What if you spent millenia staring into the eyes of The One and never said anything, never reached for him, never acknowledged that he had become, as they said, the very sun in your sky?

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale sighed, tipping his forehead against the foggy glass. “Oh my dear. If, indeed.”


End file.
